The ChangingMinds Blog!

What's the point of 'What's the point?'

Life can be very frustrating. You work hard and things somehow conspire to
make every step more difficult. You help people and they seem ungrateful. You
struggle and others constantly let you down. 'What's the point?' you say,
throwing your arms in the air and rolling your eyes to heaven.

But what is the point of 'What's the point'? Why do we say it? What does it
do for us?

'What's the point?' is also a rather difficult philosophical question. It
does not have a good answer without delving into the purpose of life or the
nature of humanity. Asking the question does not really seek an answer -- what
it does is prevent an answer.

Another clue is in the gesture that commonly accompanies the phrase.
Appealing to the gods, even metaphorically, assumes some other force at work,
outside of your control. There seems nothing you can do to change the situation,
let alone other people.

So what do you do? Most typically, you give up.

And there's the point. Saying 'What's the point?' lets you give up. The full
rhetorical question is 'What's the point in my continuing when I am being
constantly frustrated?' And the unspoken answer is 'None.'

In this way, 'What's the point?' gives you reason, justifying abandonment of
your efforts. You can stop and still feel good. There is no need for shame. In
fact you can feel a righteous indignation about the waste of your time. In this
way you can transition from the pain of a difficult situation to the comfort of
knowing you are morally superior. Perhaps if you continued your efforts or
changed your approach you would have succeeded. But thinking about this would
open the wound, so you do not.

So 'What's the point?' has a very useful point, after all. Yet it also
carries dark dangers that can ruin your life.

This little question can become a rather too useful method of transforming
pain into pleasure. It can quietly invade your life as it is steadily deployed
more often and more quickly, until it becomes a reflexive habit. Yet while it
excuses you from short-term discomfort, it does nothing for your long term
prospects. In fact it can be very harmful to your future.

Life is hard. It needs you to overcome obstacles, not avoid them. If you give
up, you will go nowhere.

If you want to succeed, yet you are not succeeding, you must change. And
here, at this point of self-challenge, lies another danger, because 'What's the
point?' can pop up and save itself by convincing yourself that even if you
change, the result will be the same. So why bother, it asks.

To get away from this pernicious trap, you first have to get away from
'What's the point?' First notice yourself thinking it. Then realize what real
harm it is doing to you. Get angry with it. Beat it up and throw it away.
Determine never to let it back. Then replace it with other, more useful thoughts
that help you overcome obstacles rather than avoid them. Like 'I can do it' or
'Let's try something different' or 'I'm not going to let them beat me'.

A secret of success is knowing what is stopping you from succeeding, and then
getting past it. 'What's the point?' is just such a trap. If it is holding you
back, you can now see it and stop it, forever.